I have never been brilliant with directions, which is how I ended up driving down what I can only describe as a gravel path masquerading as a road, convinced I was about to discover a shortcut to Bratten Strand. My partner sat beside me in that particular silence that is not quite supportive, not quite panicked, just deeply resigned. The sat nav had given up on us three miles back. The gravel gave up shortly after, depositing us in a small clearing surrounded by pine trees and the distinct feeling that we were now officially lost in North Jutland.

This was meant to be straightforward. Fly to Aalborg, hire car, follow signs, arrive at holiday cottage, drink wine, relax. Instead we found ourselves staring at a rusted tractor and wondering whether Danish emergency services would understand my pronunciation of "help, we are in some trees."

We turned around, eventually, creeping back along the gravel until we reached a proper road, and that is when we spotted the sign. Hand-painted, slightly weather-beaten, pointing down a lane we would never have noticed: "Havn." Just harbour. Nothing else. We were already lost, so we thought, why not be deliberately lost?

The lane wound through low dunes covered in marram grass, the kind that scratches at your ankles and makes everything look properly wild. Then suddenly the trees opened up and there was this tiny harbour, barely a dozen boats, water so still it looked like someone had forgotten to turn the motion back on. An old man sat on a folding chair fishing, and he nodded at us as if people stumbled in there every day, which I suspect they absolutely do not. We sat on the rocks for half an hour watching cormorants dry their wings on a wooden post. No other tourists. No ice cream van. Just the smell of seaweed and that particular quiet you only find when you have gone wrong somewhere excellent.

We found our actual cottage eventually, of course. Bratten Strand itself, when we finally arrived, was everything the photographs promised. Clean lines, big windows, that Scandinavian talent for making everything feel both minimal and comfortable. The sort of place where you feel slightly underdressed for your own holiday. But here is the thing: I kept thinking about that wrong turn.

The next morning we set out without the sat nav, which my partner had ceremonially switched off over breakfast. We drove until a road looked interesting, then followed it. This is not a strategy I would recommend in most places. In North Jutland, somehow, it works. We found a bakery in a village I still cannot name, where the woman behind the counter spoke no English and we spoke approximately twelve words of Danish between us. We pointed, she smiled, we ended up with something warm and cardamom-scented that was probably intended for three people. We ate it in a churchyard watching clouds move across a sky that seemed to take up more space than skies reasonably should.

That afternoon we got properly lost again, missing a turning somewhere near the coast and ending up on a track that ran parallel to the beach, hidden behind more of those scratching dunes. We parked where the track gave out and walked through to find a stretch of sand completely empty, not a footprint, not a dog walker, just the sea doing its endless grey-green thing and the distant sound of someone, somewhere, probably also lost, laughing on the wind.

I have been on holidays where everything went according to plan. They were fine. This was better. There was something about North Jutland that rewarded the wandering, the accidental, the slightly incompetent. The cottage became our base rather than our destination. Each evening we would return with some small discovery: a lake we had not known existed, a bench with a view that surely nobody had bothered to photograph, a path through heather that led to absolutely nothing except the satisfaction of having walked it.

On our last day we tried to find that first harbour again, the one with the hand-painted sign. We failed, which felt entirely appropriate. Either we had invented it, or it only exists for people who are genuinely, hopelessly, gloriously off course. I prefer to believe the latter. Some places, I think, keep themselves for the lost.